With the increasing popularity of mobile communications there has come renewed interest in joint source-channel coding. The reason is that shared mobile communications channels are restrictive in terms of bandwidth and suffer from such as fading and interference etc., thus making some form of error protection essential, particularly where variable length codes are used. Further, it is well known that standard approaches to error correction are expensive, in terms of required bandwidth, hence there exists a need for systems and methodology which can provide efficient source and channel encoding and symbol decoding with error correction. Viable candidates include a joint source-channel encoding system and methodology which utilizes characteristics of a source, or source encoder, to provide error protection.
As background, it is noted that one of the earliest works that examined the effect of errors on variable length codes was that of Maxted and Robinson in an article titled “Error Recovery for Variable Length Codes”, IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, IT-31, p. 794-801, (November 1985). Corrections and additions to said work were provided by Monaco and Lawlor in “Error Recovery for Variable Length Codes”, IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, IT-33, p. 454-456, (May 1987). And said work was later extended by Soualhi et al. in “Simplified Expression for the Expected Error Span Recovery for Variable Length Codes”, Intl. J. of Electronics, 75, p. 811-816, (November 1989), and by Rahman et al. in “Effects of a Binary Symetric Channel on the Synchronization Recovery of Variable length Codes”, Computer J., 32, p. 246-251, (January 1989); as well as by Takishima et al. in “Error States and Synchronization Recovery for Variable Length Codes”, IEEE Trans. on Communications, 42, p. 783-792; as well as by Swaszek et al. in “More on the Error Recovery for Variable Length Codes”, IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, IT-41, p. 2064-2071, (November 1995)., all of which focused mainly on the resynchronization ability of Huffman Codes.
In terms of joint source channel coding where the source and source encoder characteristics are used to provide error protection, one of the earliest works which incorporated variable length codes was that of Sayood, Liu and Gibson in “Implementation Issues in MAP Joint Source/Channel Coding”, Proc. 22nd Annular Asilomar Conf. on Circuits, Systems, and Computers, p. 102-106, IEEE, (November 1988). Assuming a Markov model for the source encoder output they used packetization to prevent error propagation and the residual redundancy at the source encoder output to provide error protection. This approach is used by Park and Miller who have developed a bit constrained decoder specifically for use with variable codes, (see “Decoding Entropy-Coded Symbols Over Noisy Channels by MAP Sequency Estimation for Asynchronous HMMs”, Proc. Conference on Information Sciences and Systems, IEEE, (March 1999). Murad and Fuja, in “Robust Transmissions of Variable-Length Encoded Sources”, Proc. IEEE Wireless and Networking Conf. 1999, (September 1999); and Sayood, Otu and Demir in “Joint Source/Channel Coding for Variable Length Codes”, IEEE Transactions on Communications, 48:787-794, (May 2000), describe designs which make use of the redundancy at the source coder output for error correction.
The problem of low bandwidth hostile channels can also be addressed using error resilent source codes which incorporate the possibility of errors in the channel and provide mechanisms for error concealment. Work in the area includes that of Yang. et al. as reported in “Robust Image Compression Based on Self-Synchronizing Huffman Code and Inter-Subband Dependency”, Proc. thirty-second Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, p. 986-972 (November 1997), who use the self-synchronizing property of suffix rich Huffman codes to limit error propagation, and correlation between subbands to provide error correction/concealment.
In addition, there exist a number of concatenated schemes in which the source and channel encoders are concatenated in the traditional manner with channel resources allocated between them based on the characteristics of the channel. If the channel is very noisy, more bits are allocated to the channel and fewer to source encoding, and the situation is reversed when the channel conditions are more favorable. Examples of this approach include the work of Regunathan et al. as presented in an article titled “Robust Image Compression for Time Varying Channels”, Proc. Thirty-first Asilomar Conf. on Signals, Systems and Computers, p. 968-972, (November 1997) and in an article titled “Progressive Image Coding for Noisy Channels”, by Sherwood et al., IEEE Signal Processing Lett., 4 p. 189-191, (July 1997).
Most of the schemes referenced above use Huffman coding or variants thereof as the variable length coding scheme, however, with the increasing popularity of arithmetic coding, there has developed interest in joint source channel coding schemes which use said arithmetic coding. One such approach is described in “Arithmetic Coding Algorithm with Embedded Channel Coding”, ElMasry, Electronics Lett., 33 p. 1687-1688, (September 1997); and another is described in “Integrating Error Detection into Arithmetic Coding”, Boyd et al., IEEE Transactions on Communications, 45(1), p. 1-3, (January 1997). The ElMasry approach involves generation of parity bits which are embedded into arithmetic coding procedure for error correction. The Boyd approach showed that by reserving probability space for a symbol which is not in the source alphabet the arithmetic code can be used for detecting errors. Reserving probability space for a symbol that will never be generated means that less space remains for the source alphabet and this translates into a higher coding rate. Said overhead, however, is small considering the capability of error detection enabled, as described by Kozintsev et al. in “Image Transmission Using Arithmetic Coding Based on Continuous Error Detection”, Proc. of Data Compression Conf. p. 339-348, IEEE Computer Society Press, (1998) regarding two scenarios, (eg. Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) based communications and serially concatenated coding schemes with an inner error correction code and an outer error detection code), which use error detecting capability of the arithmetic code with an error detection space.
With an eye to the present invention a Key-word Search for relevant Patents which involve inner and outer coding, trellis coding, data compression, error detection, error correction, variable length coding, arithmetic coding, and data transmission over noisy channels, has provided:    U.S. Pat. No. 5,200,962 to Kao et al. is disclosed as it describes data compression with error correction.    U.S. Pat. No. 5,745,504 to Bang is disclosed as it describes bit error resilient variable length code transmission.    U.S. Pat. No. 6,009,203 to Liu et al. is disclosed as it describes variable length coding.    U.S. Pat. No. 5,233,629 to Paik et al. is disclosed as it concerns trellis coded quadrature amplitude modulation.    U.S. Pat. No. 4,862,464 to Betts et al. is disclosed as it describes error detection in digital modems using trellis coding.    U.S. Pat. No. 5,206,864 to McConnell is disclosed as it concerns optimization of error correction, inner and outer coding.    U.S. Pat. No. 5,841,794 to Inoue et al. is disclosed as it describes error correction for digital data.    U.S. Pat. No. 5,910,967 to Vanderaar is disclosed as it describes concatenated coding in which an inner code is configured to match the needs of an outer code.    U.S. Pat. No. 5,870,405 to Hardwick et al. is disclosed as it describes digital communication over noisy channels.    U.S. Pat. No. 5,517,511 to Hardwick et al. is disclosed as it describes transmission of digital data over noisy channels.    U.S. Pat. No. 5,983,382 to Pauls is disclosed as it concerns outer coding.Patents disclosed because they discuss Arithmetic coding are:            U.S. Pat. No. 5,311,177 to Kimura et al.;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,587,710 to Choo et al.;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,418,863 to Ando;        U.S. Pat. No. 4,295,125 to Langdon, Jr;        U.S. Pat. No. 4,286,256 to Langdon, Jr. et al;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,774,081 to Cheng et al.;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,715,332 to Nakanishi;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,710,826 to Osawa et al.;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,317,428 to Osawa et al.        
No known reference or combination of references, however, discloses use of a joint source-channel encoding, symbol decoding and error correction system comprising encoder means, modulation-transmission means, and combination sequential, and encoded symbol, decoding means; wherein errors detected by the encoded symbol decoding means are corrected by methodlogy involving the changing of bistable elements in said sequential decoder means, or selection of a series of sequential bits from a plurality of said serieses of sequential bits which result from changing bistable elements in said sequential decoder means, particularly where said encoder means is an arithmetic encoder and encoded symbol decoding means comprises arithmetic decoder, and encoded symbols are of variable length.